DARPA (research agency of the US Department of Defence) has developed adhesive pads that allow humans to climb vertical glass walls like geckos. In this demonstration, a man has climbed a 7 meter-high vertical glass wall using adhesive gecko-inspired pads with no other equipment. The climber wore a safety belt, although this wasn’t required.

The gecko-like pads are made of adhesive material that the company developed and successfully tested earlier in 2012. In this demonstration below, a small patch of adhesive material attached to glass is holding 300 kg of weight.

Who would have thought this is how paperclips are made!? In principle, it looks rather simple, however I have been watching the wheel running for a few minutes and I still don’t get how the tip on the paperclip gets its triangular shape.

]]>Living next to a nuclear plant for 1 year gives you 100 times less radiation than eating a bag of potato chips every day for 1 yearhttp://todayilearned.co.uk/2014/09/28/living-next-to-a-nuclear-plant-for-1-year-gives-you-100-times-less-radiation-than-eating-a-bag-of-potato-chips-every-day-for-1-year/
Sun, 28 Sep 2014 18:45:52 +0000http://todayilearned.co.uk/?p=6798

I have always thought that living next to a nuclear plant is the last thing you want to do. However, according to Forbes, living next to a nuclear plant is not a big deal.

So the whole premise is false. The average dose received by the public from nuclear power is less than 0.0002 mSv/yr, which is about 10,000 times smaller than the total yearly dose received by the public from other background radiation (WNO). Any health effects from the more abundant and diverse background radiation would completely swamp anything from reactors. But even these levels produce no observable effects.

Eating a bag of potato chips a day gives you 100 times this level, but no one cares since the fat and salt will kill you a lot faster than any radiation.

People lose weight during sleep through respiration (breathing) and perspiration (sweating). It’s estimated that during sleep, we lose 1.9 grams of weight per minute, which amounts to nearly 1 kilogram of weight per 8 hours of sleep. Most of the weight we lose during sleep is water weight that escapes our system.

Each time we exhale we lose a little bit of water. It’s easy to check – breath on a cool piece of glass and you will see some moisture.

I wrote about this practise earlier. Today, I saw this photo on my Facebook feed and could not unsee it. Different sources report that these animals are able to survive for only several days (some say, several months).

Lake Natron in Tanzania is known for turning animals into stone. The water in the lake has an extremely high pH level (10.5), enough to burn the skin upon contact and gradually turn the animals into solid state. Birds and other animals that come in contact with the lake’s waters – often by mistake – die and get mummified into stones.

Photographer Nick Brandt observed this phenomena firsthand. He found these creatures around the lake, placed them in ‘living’ positions and photographed them.

In Nick’s words,

I unexpectedly found the creatures – all manner of birds and bats – washed up along the shoreline of Lake Natron in Northern Tanzania. No-one knows for certain exactly how they die, but it appears that the extreme reflective nature of the lake’s surface confuses them, and like birds crashing into plate glass windows, they crash into the lake. The water has an extremely high soda and salt content, so high that it would strip the ink off my Kodak film boxes within a few seconds. The soda and salt causes the creatures to calcify, perfectly preserved, as they dry.

I took these creatures as I found them on the shoreline, and then placed them in ‘living’ positions, bringing them back to ‘life’, as it were. Reanimated, alive again in death.

]]>There’s no other artist who can paint oceans with such lifelike accuracyhttp://todayilearned.co.uk/2013/09/29/theres-no-other-artist-who-can-paint-oceans-with-such-lifelike-accuracy/
Sun, 29 Sep 2013 18:06:31 +0000http://todayilearned.co.uk/?p=6632

]]>Desert beetle elevates its back to collect fog water and channel it into its mouthhttp://todayilearned.co.uk/2013/09/22/desert-beetle-elevates-its-back-to-collect-fog-water-and-channel-it-into-its-mouth/
Sun, 22 Sep 2013 22:14:00 +0000http://todayilearned.co.uk/?p=6609

Namib beetle lives in African deserts where water is extremely rare. In fact, it’s hardly found anywhere other than in the ocean breeze (fog) that pays a visit once per day early in the morning. To survive, the bug collects microscopic water droplets from the fog by sticking its back out in the air.

The back of the insect is covered in tiny hydrophilic bumps that attract water droplets from the fog. Water droplets condense on the bumps and roll down the back into the insect’s mouth. The surface of the beetle’s back is extremely hydrophobic (repels water), so as soon as the droplet comes off the bump it has no choice but to roll down in the direction of the incline.

Pretty cool, isn’t it?

Inspired by this bug, a team of engineers in Boston are developing materials that mimic the way the insect extracts water from the ocean breeze. The researchers hope to bring their products to industrial scale.

As a fun fact, a science that looks into imitation of models and mechanisms found in nature to solve human problems is called biomimicry.

]]>There is a 300-page novel without a single letter ‘e’http://todayilearned.co.uk/2013/09/17/there-is-a-300-page-novel-without-a-single-letter-e/
Tue, 17 Sep 2013 17:00:19 +0000http://todayilearned.co.uk/?p=6604

Quickly try to think of 10 different words or names in your head. Chances are, at least one of them had the letter ‘E’ in it. So far, this is only a few sentences long and has already used it 14 times. Now imagine trying to write an entire novel without using ‘E’ a single time.

That’s exactly what French writer Georges Perec did in 1969 with his novel, A Void. The title comes from the translation of the French term La Disparition, which literally translates to English as The Disappearance.

Through 300 pages of text, the letter ‘e’ does not appear once in the French language. Many translators have attempted to bring the book into their native language doing the same thing: avoiding the most frequently used letter in their language, but it’s proven to be very difficult. The Spanish version does not use the letter ‘a’ as it is the most common letter in the language.

Much like “the” or “be” in the English language, there is no instance of the most common word in the French language, which is “le”. In Spanish, the top three most frequently used words contain the letter ‘e’ (el, de and que).

Perec had a unique writing style that was praised by many. As a matter of fact, he won the prix Medicis award in France for his book Life: A User’s Manual written in 1978 and was considered to be his most popular book. The unique thing about this book was the fact that it had 99 chapters over just a 600 page span.

Still, A Void will be his most unique piece. The plot of this lipogrammatic book, tags along with a band of people looking for someone gone missing. It is filled with many different parodies noir and twists in the plot and ends on a sad note. It even makes reference to the fact that the letter ‘e’ can not be used by the characters who will suffer a fatal ending if they do.

Lipogrammatic writing or any other variation takes practice. To get into the practice, you can read books like A Void to understand how and why it is used in that way, or visit the site Wordsmart to brush up on your diction. To understand why writers make some of the choices they do will help you go a long way.

For instance, it is believed that the vanishing of the letter ‘e’ is indeed a metaphor for the Jewish suffering during World War II. The author’s name has many ‘e’s in it, so you don’t see his name associated with the book at all.

A Void was inspired by the book, Gadsby: A story of Over 50,000 Words Without Using the Letter “E”, which was written by Ernest Vincent Wright in 1939. People that love forms of constrained writing have forked over good money for this book as inspiration since it is so rare to find a copy of, but has since become public domain in the United States.